MOOD: OUR HOUSE
LAUREL CANYON
I'll light the fire.
You place the flowers in the vase
That you bought today.
Staring at the fire
For hours and hours while I listen to you
Play your love songs all night long for me,
Only for me.
- Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, ‘Our House’ (G Nash)
“My friend Joel Bernstein found an old book in a flea market that said: Ask anyone in America where the craziest people live, and they’ll tell you California. Ask anyone in Hollywood where the craziest people live, and they’ll say Laurel Canyon. And ask anyone in Laurel Canyon where the craziest people live, and they’ll say Lookout Mountain. So, I bought a house on Lookout Mountain.”
- Joni Mitchell to Vanity Fair
“I came to live in America in 1969 and stayed with David [Crosby] for a couple of nights. He threw me a party and invited Joni. After that party I went home with Joni and spent a couple of years with her in her home in Laurel Canyon. One day Joan and I got up and went to breakfast at a delicatessen on Ventura Boulevard, and a few doors away there was a little antique store, and in the window, Joan saw this vase, went inside, fell in love with it, bought it and brought it back to the house. It was a kind of a cold gray morning as it sometimes can be in Los Angeles, and I said, ‘Why don’t I light the fire and you put some flowers in the vase that you just bought.” She’s cutting stems and leaves and arranging flowers in this vase, and I’d lit the fire. Now, my and Joan’s life at the time were far from ordinary … and I thought, ‘What an ordinary moment.’ And I sat down at Joan’s piano and an hour later, ‘Our House’ was written.”
- Graham Nash on writing ‘Our House’
If you hold sand too tightly in your hand, it will run through your fingers.
Love, Joan
- Telegram sent by Joni Mitchell to Graham Nash in 1970, terminating their relationship
“You can’t be in love with Joni Mitchell and then lose it. All these years, every birthday I send her a dozen roses—usually eleven white ones and one red one, or eleven red ones and one white one. I don’t know why.”
- Graham Nash to The New Yorker, 2023